Category Archives: Politics

Electronic voting report in Ohio

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Ohio has published a report on an investigation into electronic voting machines, Wired reports on it, summarising one particular finding thus:

They found that a voter or poll worker with a Palm Pilot and no more than a minute’s access to a voting machine could surreptitiously re-calibrate the touch-screen so that it would prevent voters from voting for specific candidates or cause the machine to secretly record a voter’s vote for a different candidate than the one the voter chose. Access to the screen calibration function requires no password, and the attacker’s actions, the researchers say, would be indistinguishable from the normal behavior of a voter in front of a machine or of a pollworker starting up a machine in the morning.

…and if you think that’s bad enough, then here’s an interesting comment from a collection of complaints about voting in Florida in 2006 that were assembled after an FOI request:

Vote for one candidate registered as vote for different candidate

Upon opening ballot for first time voter saw “x” by Katherine Harris’s name though voter had not touched screen yet.

So the machines are quite capable of getting things wrong without a malicious attack (well, assuming that wasn’t the cause in the above events).

So, who would you like to win today ?

(Via Bruce Schneier)

War on Difference

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Bruce Schneier has written good things on why this “war on terror” is going badly wrong. Go read..

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

[…]

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

South Africa adopts ODF as government standard

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The government of the Republic of South Africa has published (( on the RSA Open Source Software in Government website )) the latest version (4.1) of its Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for Information Systems in Government, which now includes ODF as their document format:

The main thrust of the framework (in line with international best practice), is the adoption of a structured approach with regard to information systems. To achieve this approach, and to ensure the enhancement of interoperability across Government, a minimum set of standards are included in this document as a required Government-wide standard. To this end, this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of Open Standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) Open Document Format.

It also says that they will consider open source software favourably for their IT systems:

In developing open information systems, open source based solutions are to be considered before proprietary ones

This is expanded upon in their new Policy on Free and Open Source Software use for South African Government, which codifies it as:

1) The South African Government will implement FOSS unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior. Whenever the advantages of FOSS and proprietary software are comparable FOSS will be implemented when choosing a software solution for a new project. Whenever FOSS is not implemented, then reasons must be provided in order to justify the implementation of proprietary software.

2) The South African Government will migrate current proprietary software to FOSS whenever comparable software exists.

3) All new software developed for or by the South African Government will be based on open standards, adherent to FOSS principles, and licensed using a FOSS license where possible.

4) The South African Government will ensure all Government content and content developed using Government resources is made Open Content, unless analysis on specific content shows that proprietary licensing or confidentiality is substantially beneficial.

5) The South African Government will encourage the use of Open Content and Open Standards within South Africa.

They are also being reassuringly pragmatic about it, rather than dogmatic, as the justification says:

This is not to say that FOSS/OC solutions are currently available or appropriate in every situation or for every user, a reality accommodated in the revised policy.

So, all in all, quite a positive outcome!

The Australian Election 2007 – Lest We Forget

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In 2004 the ever wonderful Clarke and Dawes did a very special (and still topical) MasterMind on John Howard and his governments history ((Those outside Australia may need to look up what a “non-core promise” is.)) and why they got re-elected.

Now they’re back for the 2007 election, with a quick quiz on “The achievements of the Howard Government” (links to a transcript and video streams of the broadcast) which is well worth watching!

Microsoft’s tactics are killing the standards process..

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After the previous reports of Microsoft stacking standards bodies, Andy Updegrove points out that there is now a far more insidious problem facing the ISO/IEC Standards Committee 34 as a result of its suddenly inflated membership.

The rules of the committee require at least 50% of the ‘P’ status members (not the observing members) return a vote in response to every ballot request (even an ‘abstain’ vote counts).

At the end of 2006 the committee had 23 members, having gained 5 over the previous 2 years.

By the time of the OOXML vote in September the number had more than doubled – and 22 new countries joined between April and the end of August, plus there were 11 new ‘P’ members.

The problem now is that none of the new ‘P’ members are bothering to vote – the last 3 ballots have failed because that 50% figure has not been hit. As Andy writes:

While I’m told that 90% of committee votes have achieved the necessary 50% return in the past, the current numbers tell a far different story: the three most recent (SC 34 N 870, SC 34 872 and SC 34 N 874) have all failed because of P member apathy. As I read the tallies at those links, only one recent P member responded to a single ballot, even after some ballots had been reissued for a second or even a third time. Had it not been necessary to include the new P members in the calculations, the second two votes would have passed (the first related to establishing a liaison relationship with another organization, and not a standard).

They haven’t even bothered to return an ‘abstain’ vote. This pretty much confirms that the only reason they could have joined the committee for was to vote “Yes (without comments)” on Microsofts OOXML proposal. 🙁

Andy then goes on to quote from the weekly memos of Secretariat Manager, Ken Holman, as in increasing desperation he tries to coax the new members into meeting their obligations and voting on ballots that are dieing from lack of interest. Here is the penultimate quote in the series to give you a flavour..

9/30/2007

You will see at that link that (as of Sunday evening) only 7 member bodies of our 38 participating members have actually submitted a ballot response….Since the recent influx of new P-members to SC 34, not a single ballot has been able to be processed…

It is critically important that P-members remember their obligations: if we do not get 20 responses per ballot, the work of SC 34 will grind to a halt….If you do not plan to participate in the work of SC 34, please consider changing your membership to Observer status. For those national bodies that joined in the interests of DIS 29500 Ecma 376 OOXML, remember that P-member/O-member status in SC 34 has no effect on attendance and voting at the Ballot Resolution Meeting being held in February. If this is your only interest, it would serve SC 34 well to change your membership status to O-member.

One wonders if they will suddenly spring back into life when Microsofts XPS standard arrives there.

MSOOXML rejected as ISO standard

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Groklaw quotes ISO as saying:

A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.

The official ISO press release is now available.

It’s good to see that trying to rort the standards process hasn’t worked this time, and a badly broken standard has not been foisted upon ISO through dubious means.

Dick Cheney talks sense on Iraq – in 1994

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Shame he seems to have forgotten about this..

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

That was Dick Cheney interviewed on CSPAN in 1994, now up on YouTube.

(Via)

China and the quest for (electrical) power

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Back in February 2006 I blogged about a BBC news report, commenting:

To give you a feel for how much power China needs they are currently, on average, bringing on one new power station a week!

Well 18 months later the BBC now says, as part of an article about China’s attempts to cut emissions by 10% between 2005 and 2010:

However, with China now building about two new fossil fuel power stations every week, Western environmental commentators say it will be all but impossible for it to achieve that reduction.

If that is correct and their building program has doubled in 18 months and if it follows a sort of Moore’s law for power stations then we’re looking at around one new power station a day by the end of the decade.